“Am I supposed to guess?”
“No way, Danny. You’d never make it. I’m going to announce the impending retirement of Colonel Marjorie Menninger from active service.”
“What?”
“Pick your teeth up, Danny, and don’t just stand there,” she advised, tugging him along. “We’re going to convert this place to civilian government, effective as soon as the emergency is over. Or maybe before. I don’t care. Maybe all you guys who’re bitching about the army way of doing things are right. I have to say that my way hasn’t been working out too well, everything considered. So I think we’re going to need elections for a new government, and if you want my advice you’ll run.”
“For what? Why me? Margie, you get me all mixed up!”
“Why you? Because you’re practically the only original settler left, you know that? Just you and Gappy. Because nobody hates your guts. Because you’re the only person in the camp who has the age and experience to handle the job of running things and who isn’t a soldier. Don’t let me pressure you. It’s your decision. But you’ve got my vote. If,” she added in a different tone, “anything we decide makes any difference at all now.”
They were at his tent, and Marge paused at the flap, staring up at the sky. “Oh, shit,” she said, “it’s beginning to rain.” It was — big drops, with promise of more behind them.
“The casualties!” he said.
“Yeah. We’re going to have to get them under cover. And that’s a pity, Danny, because I was kind of hoping we could catch us a little R and R before the meeting.”
In spite of everything, Danny could not help himself. He laughed out loud. “Marjorie Menninger, you are some kind of strange. Get in there and get some sleep.” But before she turned, he put his arms around her for a moment. “I never would have thought it of you,” he said. “What converted you to civilian values?”
“Who’s converted?” Then she said, “Well, maybe it was that fucking Krinpit. If it hadn’t been for him, you’d’ve been burying me a little while ago, too. I didn’t trust him, either, but he gave his silly life to save me.”
With so few of them left, they didn’t really need the PA system to cope with the fifty-five or sixty persons listening, but they hooked in one speaker for the benefit of the casualties who were well enough to hear, in their tents down the hill. The rest sat or stood on the wet planks of the dance floor in the sullen, steady rain while Marge Menninger spoke to them from the little dais. She turned the stage over to Harcourt.
He said, “A lot of the data from the Greasies isn’t astronomy, it’s geology. They’ve done a lot of digging. They say there seem to be flare episodes every twenty or thirty years. There’s no set pattern, but by the amount of ash and char, they think your average flare involves about a seventy-five percent increase in radiation spread out over a period of a week or more. That’s enough to kill us. Partly heat. Mostly ionizing radiation.
“Now, when does it happen? Their best guess is ten days, — give or take ten days.” There was a murmur from the audience, and he nodded. “Sorry about that, but I don’t have the training to make it any closer than they do; in fact, I’m only taking their word. The picture I get is of slowly increasing heat over a period of a couple of weeks. I think we’ve been having that, and maybe it’s why the weather has been so lousy. Then the flare. Surface temperature goes up to maybe three-fifty degrees. That’s Kelvin — say, somewhere between where we are now and the boiling point of water. I don’t think it goes over that, not for very long, anyway. But there are peak flares, and they’re like striking a match. If anything can burn, it will. Apparently the forests burn, but maybe not right away — they’d probably have to dry out first. Then the flare recedes, the temperature comes down, the air drops out moisture, and you get rain to put out the fires. Probably a hell of a lot of rain, over a period of weeks or months. Then you’re back to normal.”
“Only dead,” somebody called out from the audience. Harcourt spread his hands defensively.
“Maybe not. If you’re in shelter, you might survive.” He started to continue, then stopped himself. Margie came up beside him.
“You don’t sound too confident.”
“I’m not. The — ah, the geological record doesn’t inspire much confidence. The Greasies took cores from more than a hundred different sites, and they all showed the same pattern — recurring char and soil, back thousands of years.”
Dalehouse stood up. “Alex,” he called, “why hasn’t it killed off everything on the surface of Jem long ago?”
“You’re asking for a guess? I guess it has. At least all the vegetation. It burns off, then regrows from roots, most likely. Seeds probably would survive, though. And those drenching rains after each flare would give the new growth a good start in fertile soil — the char’s great fertilizer; primitive man used to slash and burn to get his farms started, back on Earth. I don’t know about the animals. I’d guess the Creepies would be all right in their tunnels if they didn’t starve to death waiting for new growth to live on. Probably a lot of them do. Maybe the same for the Krinpit, because it would take a lot to kill them off. They don’t have to worry about being blinded by the radiation, because they don’t have any eyes to begin with. And those shells are pretty good armor for their vital organs. Probably get a lot of mutations, but in the long run that’s as much good as it is bad for the race.”
“What about Charlie?”
“I don’t know. That’s harder. I guess a really good flare might wipe out damn near all the adults. But that’s when they spawn, and the spawn might survive — also, no doubt, with a lot of mutations. I’d say evolution moves pretty fast here.”
“Well, look,” Margie cut in, “if all these things can survive, why can’t we?”
Harcourt shrugged. “They’re adapted, we’re not. Besides, I’m talking about races surviving, not individuals. Maybe as few as one percent live through it. Maybe less.” He looked around the audience. “One percent of us leaves how many?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Margie said slowly. “Well, I think we get the picture. We need to get under something big enough to stop both heat and radiation, and we need to do it in a hurry. Got any ideas on what we can make a roof out of?”
Harcourt hesitated. “Not a clue,” he confessed. “Certainly the tents won’t do it. Oh, and I should mention the winds. They probably get pretty fierce, with all that insolation. So anything we did build would have to stand up to maybe two-hundred-kilometer-an-hour hurricanes. Maybe more. I, uh, I thought, for a minute of using the Creepies’ tunnels, and that might work — for some of us, anyway. But I doubt more than ten percent of us would live through maybe two or three weeks underground without very good ventilation and certainly without air conditioning — and that air down there is going to get hot. ”
There was a silence while everyone considered possibilities. Then Kappelyushnikov came forward. “Is one thing we can do,” he announced. “Not many of us. Maybe fifteen, twenty. Can get in return capsule and go into orbit.”
“It’s just as hot there,” Marge Menninger protested.
Gappy shook his head. “Is only radiation. Steel hull reflects ninety-nine percent, maybe. Anyway, plenty. Only problem — who decides which twenty lucky people go up?”
Marge Menninger thought for a moment, then said, “No, that’s a last ditch, Gappy. There’s another problem with it: what do those lucky fellows do when they come down again? There aren’t enough of us left now. I don’t think twenty would be enough to survive. If we went up — strike that; I’m not saying I would be one of the ‘we.’ If anyone went up, it’d be just as smart to keep on going. Try to get back to Earth. Maybe go to one of the other colonies. The chances would be as good as coming back here when the whole planet’s fried.”